"To Geoff Exeter. Yes. We did the same thing with him that you saw two nights ago with me in the chair. Unfortunately—there's a feeble word!—we bungled somehow. And Geoff is blind."
"You get used to it," said Geoff Exeter cheerfully. "It's in a good cause. Better cause than we fought the Nazis for if Jerry Wolfe was right."
"We're banking that he was. We're betting our eyes or our lives, Johnson, that he was right."
"If you'll forgive me, sir, it seems a terribly long chance to take. He might have been addled in the head, or drunk; or if he was right, you may all lose your eyes and never acquire his strange vision."
"We're relying on old Jerry," said Alec Talbot. "You see, at least three of us were at loose ends, with nothing to make of our lives, and our hearts full of bitterness and frustration. It's given us an aim in life. It's given us life itself, by heaven! We drew lots, Geoff and Will and I; Geoff got first try, Will the second, and I lost. I'm to be the third one. Before he was murdered, Jerry told me who was all right and who wasn't. He'd seen a few chaps he knew—Will and Geoff and the doctor here, Marion and Colonel Bedford. He bequeathed me their names. I rounded them up and beat them with Jerry's yarn until they began to feel a horrid truth in it. Then just a few days ago I remembered that you'd been our waiter at the Club that night, and he'd sat easy and safe in your presence; so we knew you were human too."
"I'm sure I'm very gratified, sir. But what can I do?"
"We don't know. We don't know what any of us can do. But we were only six. Johnson—six against half a world. We grasped at you like a drowning man at a—"
"Straw," said Marion. "Really, Alec, your similes stun me!"
"I was going to say 'bottle of whisky'," growled Alec.